New Forum Wishlist - but read roadmap first

7 days ago "timestamp"

Since very recently the comments don't display a time stamp anymore but an indication of how long ago it was posted. I much preferred the former timestamp because one could use it to refer to a specific post, e.g. "@AC GMT 01:43..."

Why the change?

This change also makes the link to the post, in context of the forum, smaller - and even less obvious than it already was.

To be grumpy, I must say that I think your web designers keep making changes to these forums, that make things less obvious and easy to read at a glance.

In your pursuit of minimalism, readability seems to suffer at every turn. Text size gets smaller, links are removed, along with dividing lines, shading and colour. Have you secretly been taking refugees from Microsoft's Metro team?

This is in marked contrast to the articles\main pages, where you have a few too many elements for clarity. I've no objection to adverts, but because you have so much stuff, mixed in with ads, jump-lists and menus, all the stuff on the side-bars sort of merges into one.

Not to play the disability card (he says as he's doing it), but as someone with about 5-10% of average vision, I value clarity extremely highly. And I call down curses upon all web designers who choose dark brown text on a light brown background!

I admit I'm an edge-case, and discrimination legislation notwithstanding, I believe you should concentrate scarce resources on catering to the majority of your customers. But I struggle to accept that any user would prefer a lack of clarity to the alternative. I'm not saying things are bad, by any means, just that several changes in the last year or so, have been for the worse.

Up / Down Votes Dolled Out By Me

At the top of the 'My Posts' page is a count of how many up/down votes I've received. I'd like to see a count of how many up/down votes I've dolled out to others.

I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but up-voting and down-voting requires a complete reload of the site. This is *so* 1990's. Could you at least add one or two lines of javascript?

If you use the principles of graceful degradation then it doesn't even have to break anything. And it would really benefit the one or two of us who have these cutting edge browsers that support this new-fangled javascript.

Similarly, seeing as I'm being forced to log in every day, perhaps you could make that a less tedious task by throwing a bit of javascript at that?

Also, I don't see why a bunch of ideas have been ruled out because "they could be gamed". Entire websites have been (successfully) built around these ideas that can be "gamed".

I would also like to "+1" the suggestion of getting notifications when any post of mine has been responded to. It's a pain having to log in, open an article, click comments, click my posts, middle click a handful of my posts, ...and scroll.

All great apart from that!

Where's Wally?

Now that el Reg is working on on a New York - Paris - Peckham basis it would be handy to have some indication, e.g. a national flag, of which office was filing a story rather than having to memorise where each Reg correspondent is based or wading through an article trying to find out whether or not it is relevant. For example in this article I need to read down to the third paragraph to discover that this story relates to the other side of the world.

I note the earlier unwillingness to let us commentards display goatse avatars but it would also be handy if we could opt in to display national flags which would help even out cross-cultural surprises.

Concerted and Determined Campaign to educate the masses about British Telecom

Anyone who has had experience of this shameful, shambolic and frankly disingenuous company for broadband...need I say more?

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/68221

Just sign the f*****g petition people! let's get this done!

OMG!

BBC has just stolen el-Reg's website design!

Have you tried viewing the BBC news site with javascript disabled? It looks like it's the mobile layout that ends up getting displayed.

JavaScript controlled layout. Seriously.

It's a joke. Perhaps some of us could club together and buy the BBC website designers a book on CSS?

Didn't the BBC use to win design awards for their websites? I wonder when was the last time they won anything?

What I can't figure out it...how do you make a NEW forum post? I can't see it anywhere.

10 minute window for editing posts

There have been a few occasions where I've managed to start editing a post, go over the limit by a minute or two and then get the change rejected when I submit the change (which can be annoying if the change was big).

Is there a chance of extending this window for times when editing started within the 10 minutes? It wouldn't require a huge difference - perhaps allow a total of 15 minutes to edit a post if the editing started within the 10 minute window for example.

Although personally I would suggest extending the period either way. Sometimes I find myself wanting to add additional points to the post but finding myself unable to do so within that post. Perhaps allow additional text to be added outside the 10 minute window but label them as edits & display a timestamp for when the edit was made?

Also I'm not sure if this counts as a bug or enhancement but the 'my posts' link on the mobile version of your site seems to appear at the bottom of the page. This makes getting to it more time consuming than it needs to be on phones when there is a lot of scrolling to do to get past all my comments to get there. Could you please add these links at the top of the page too on the mobile version?

If I'm already in a section and have clicked on the link to start a new topic, then I have to select that section a second time before posting my message.

Shouldn't the section I've just come from be the default selection in the drop down box, since if I'm in that section then I'll probably want to add the topic there?

Also please consider re-introducing the time stamp for each post or display some sort of unique ID with each post. Doing so will make referring to a specific post much easier - especially when so many people post as anonymous coward.